1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a dough portioning and kneading machine.
2. Background Art
Dough portioning and kneading machines as known for instance from U.S. Pat. No. 5,242,698 comprise a dough hopper and a conveying chamber, which is disposed downstream of the latter and has a conveying piston driven to reciprocate and serving to fill a number of metering chambers disposed in a rotary slide valve. Each metering chamber is provided with a metering piston which is displaced with the filling stroke and which, upon the return stroke of the conveying piston, ejects one dough piece at a time from the respective metering chamber, the rotary slide valve being simultaneously rotated. The dough pieces drop into kneading chambers of a kneading device. After the kneading, the kneaded dough pieces are discharged by way of a conveying device and supplied for instance to a fermenter.
In practice, there is the problem that pieces from doughs of different recipes must be metered at the same time, which must then be treated in common, i.e. they must leave the oven in common and at the same time for being packed in a common packet. Very often, these pieces of doughs of varying recipes must even have a different weight.